It’s taken more than half a month, but I’ve finally found time to sit down and write a brief note here to celebrate the fact that my blog is now 11 years old. Perseverance in the blogosphere is easy, especially if you only bother to update your blog once a year! I think in fact [...]
Just a quick note for the occasional visitor to this site. I’m going to try to prune comment spam by using the (Tim) Burke solution: comments are still enabled but I’ve required you to register if you want to say something here on the blog. Hopefully this will encourage community and keep me from having [...]
I’m a professor. I have a lot of books. After testing several bibliography apps I chose BookCrawler to catalog my home library (mostly so I could alphabetize it) with my iPod touch. The program is great — using Pic2Shop as a barcode scanner it easily sucked down info about my books. In one case when [...]
(delivered at Sof this week) I’ve organized my drosh for today around two song lyrics. I’ll tell you about the second one later. The first is from one of my favorite musicians, Tom Waits, who says in one of his songs: “The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.” Reading this parshah, right at [...]
With broadband adoption surging across the country, my wife and I are switching our netflix subscription to unlimited streaming + four CDs at home at a time. It’s the opposite of adoption patterns but makes good sense. Think about it: after two years with a Roku box we are simply running out of things to [...]
When I recently decided to bite the bullet and get to the bottom of sake tasting and nomenclature I purchased a copy of The Sake Handbook by John Gauntner. Even in the Internet Age, I reasoned, a sole-authored guidebook would be more useful than endless googling through Wikipedia pages, right? Sadly, after a month with [...]
High production values and a satisfying blend of game elements make The Dungeon Saga a great deal of fun, despite some game balance issues. The Dungeon Saga has been compared to a lot of other games, but is best conceived as a cross between Puzzle Quest and Dungeon Raid. You character advances across a very [...]
My scientist mother, reading “My Big Animal Book” with her children: “Yes, that’s a guinea pig…sometimes they live in labs… they’re good models for the third trimester…”
Years ago I stopped writing reviews on sites like amazon.com because their terms of service basically gave them my work. Sure, I wrote reviews for works by friends that I thought deserved some publicity, and for particularly superb things I’d throw a review out there as a way to say thanks for people’s work. But [...]
If Gilles Deleuze and Roy Wagner had an arm wrestling match, who would win? No wait! If Felix Guattari and Roy Wagner had an arm wrestling match, who would win? That’s a better question.
Not the title of a derivative mystery novel or an article aping Marshall Sahlins. Rather, the list of people who wished me happy birthday when Teh Internetz told them it had occurred. There is some secret mission at which only this unique combination of skills can succeed but I’m not sure what it is. 10 [...]
This weekend I moderated a panel at a conference. One of the speakers there was one of the guys who is responsible for helping to measure Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (that’s what it’s called). There are a lot of Hawaii-Bhutan connections, and it occurred to me that Bhutan has a lot in common with another [...]
“The task of the anthropologist is to get as near as possible to what actually happens, but to place it and to think about it in a context of humanity in general” -Meyer Fortes, Introduction to The Segmentary Lineage Model Reconsidered
“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.” —David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
I feel that we have gone to such great lengths to memorialize Elizabeth Taylor The Aids Activist and Serious Actor that we are in danger of forgetting the legacy of Elizabeth Taylor In A Slip In Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Does that make me a bad person?
Me: It sounds corny but I think living in Hawai’i really has taught me to have more aloha for people. Reasonably Famous Anthropologist: Yes, I wasn’t sure if it was having children or something else but you seem much less… agitated…
It’s a sign of how neglected this blog has become that I failed to blog its tenth anniversary on 1 Jan 2011. The neglect is a sign of success — tweeting, blogging for Savage Minds, writing for Inside Higher Ed, and of course working on actual academic publications. Still, it’s a bit sad that I [...]
As a new father, I am facing a dilemma that men before me have faced for generations: what songs should go into the first set that I learn to play on the ukulele to my adorable children? After some serious thought I’ve settled on: I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning (Bright Eyes) It’s You I like [...]
My latest column at Inside Higher Ed is up — “The iPad for Academics“. My review of the iPad was not unabashedly positive — I think it makes a great PDF reader, but that it hardly eclipses the laptop for most of the jobs that academics do. That said, I wanted to make a few [...]
And so they look upon one another and make love, drawn into the genital “labyrinth of desire” that God created specially for them and obeying the “tacit commandments” engraved as a benediction in their very bodies, men and women avenge themselves upon their enemy, death. For to leave behind one’s own image — “drawn to [...]
Me: I think it’s high time we watched Secret Silent Baby Hunter Episode. [pause] Scarily Erudite Beloved: You mean that “World’s Happiest Baby” DVD? Me: Isn’t that what I said?
One of the websites on chabad.org dealing with pidyon haben starts with the subheading “special care must be taken with new entities”. The idea is a well known one in Torah: first fruits and all that. But if there’s one thing that having a baby — and by that I mean ‘watching my wife have [...]
Obviously, it should not be a surprise that libraries collect works of fiction, but I have to admit that it seems strange to me. Libraries, in Alex Golub land, are for preserving knowledge and passing down knowledge — the kind of thing thing that normal bookstores don’t do. Why keep a copy of The Scarlet [...]
I’m a father. Mom and kids are healthy and happy. More info behind passwords in All The Usual Locations. At some point I will end up blogging something about my life as a father but finding the line between public and private in re: die kinder is tricky. So for now everyone who is need [...]
O is the Library of Congress Call Letter for home economics and cooking. Many researchers are surprised to find O dedicated to such a specific topic. However, cognoscenti such as myself know not just the contents of this call number, but the history behind it. As many of you know, the modernization of the Library [...]
My laptop temporarily melted. I blame the third party power source. Let this be a lesson to you, ebay shoppers. Back with O tomorrow.
I think of this as a sort of light, linen yellow. Daffodil. If that’s a color. I know where N is on the second floor of Hamilton, but to be honest there is only one thing that I remember (I think) about it: this is the place where, for god knows what reason, they store [...]
Oh the horror. I have a strong sense the M is cantaloupe, even though I have no memory of what is in it. Actually that is not true — I think it is art. But then again that might be N. Or vice versa. I am guess that M is art. I seem to remember [...]
Banana yellow. And just as slippery. The flavor of that ‘banana flavor’ flavoring that tastes nothing like bananas. There is an old saying — that I first heard one winter in college uttered by Jack Palance in his his strange baddie role in the movie Cyborg II — that if you want to dine with [...]
Why do I think that law, as a topic, is a pale, pastel pink? It was when I was at Chicago, taking a course at the law school, that I had this sudden realization that some of the most brilliant thinkers of all time were lawyers. I don’t know why this seemed like a surprise [...]